We imagine you have a lot going on in the lead-up to the Fourth of July and America 250 celebrations. Many of our friends and neighbors are putting the final touches on their parade floats, buying up hot dogs for their barbecues, or just trying to stay cool amidst the heat wave making its way across the country right now.
As for us? We’re reflecting on the first anniversary of the signing of President Trump and congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).
We warned in the lead-up and aftermath of the bill that it would only be “big” and “beautiful” for rich people like us and the companies we head. Now, with a year under our belts, we have hard evidence that our predictions about the GOP’s legislation were correct. Thanks to OBBBA, between 2025 and 2034, tax revenue will plummet by $4.5 trillion, with $1 trillion of that flowing to the top 1% of taxpayers alone while the poorest households will be left worse off. This represents the single largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in US history.
OBBBA was such a historic piece of legislation—albeit, not in a good way—that we feel it’s important to make some noise about it on its first anniversary. For this week’s Closer Look, we’ve decided to do just that. While it’s easy to get swept up in the nostalgia that comes with America 250 festivities, we also need to reflect on what’s happened over the past year. We’ll first give you a brief refresher on what OBBBA did and then give you the full picture of how much it’s helped the wealthy and corporations at the expense of workers over the last year. Just as we did two weeks ago, we’ll do our best to close on a positive note by sharing the plans we have to make up for OBBBA’s failings and chart a new, more economically just course for all.
(Parts of this piece are lightly edited from our Closer Looks from July 4, 2025 and May 21, 2025.)
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Short on time? Here’s what you need to know
- This Fourth of July is America’s 250th birthday. It is also the first anniversary of the signing of President Trump and congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).
- OBBBA has some provisions that helped workers, including its extension and expansion of the increased standard deduction and Child Tax Credit and its infamous “No Tax On…” tips, overtime, auto loan interest, and seniors. But most of its provisions worked to help the rich. These included lower income tax rates and brackets, a deduction for “pass-through” businesses, higher estate tax thresholds, business tax breaks, and some special industry tax breaks.
- This year, the top 20% of earners received 72% of the benefits from OBBBA, with the top 1% reaping 22% alone. Meanwhile, the bottom 20% of earners saw less than 1% of the benefits. 88 corporations also paid $0 in federal corporate income tax in 2025.
- There’s a misconception that OBBBA benefits the merely-rich, and not necessarily billionaires and the ultra-ultra-rich. But thanks to some of OBBBA’s lesser-known provisions like the pass-through deduction, billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Dick and Liz Uihlein have actually reaped millions in tax savings.
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What did the One Big Beautiful Bill Act do?
We’re one year out from OBBBA becoming law, and rich people like us are still getting showered with tax treats like candy at a Fourth of July parade. Here is a rundown of some of those tax treats, along with a brief description of how they benefited the wealthy and corporations:
- Income tax rates and brackets—OBBBA permanently extended the first Trump tax bill, 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), keeping its income tax rates and bracket thresholds for the federal income tax, which were overwhelmingly tilted to help high-income earners.
- Pass-through businesses—It permanently extended the TCJA’s 20% deduction for pass-through businesses, including “small businesses” like those owned by billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Dick and Liz Uihlein.
- Estate tax—It permanently extended and expanded the TCJA’s increased estate tax thresholds. This year, thanks to OBBBA, the thresholds are $15 million for single filers and $30 million for married couples. They will also be indexed to inflation in the future.
- Business tax breaks—The bill permanently and retroactively reinstated a host of large tax breaks for businesses, including some breaks (such as deductions for bonus depreciation, research and development, and net interest) that were limited or phased out by the TCJA in order to pay for that bill’s massive corporate tax cut. Now, those firms get to eat their corporate tax cut cake and have it too.
- Special industry breaks—The bill gave a special carve-out to the Corporate Alternative Minimum tax (CAMT) for large oil and gas companies; tax benefits to spaceports (which benefit companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX); special tax credits to the coal and semiconductor industries; and the extension of a rum tax rebate for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which largely flows to big producers like Bacardí.
While OBBBA doled out some tax goodies to workers, they were more like off-brand breath mints while the full-size candy bars were saved for rich folks like us. For example, the bill permanently extended the TCJA’s increased standard deduction and temporarily expanded it through the end of 2028. But because it repealed personal exemptions, OBBBA was a wash for many low- and middle-income tax filers and even left some filers worse off—particularly those who previously itemized and gave generously to charity. Likewise, the bill permanently extended the TCJA’s Child Tax Credit and increased its maximum credit to $2,200 per child, but limited the ability of millions of families to qualify.
Over the last year, Trump hasn’t stopped talking about OBBBA’s infamous “No Tax On…” tips, overtime, auto loan interest, and seniors. And while they did help workers, you’ll see in the next section that they aren’t really anything that Trump should be bragging about.
How much did the One Big Beautiful Bill Act help the rich and hurt the poor?
It’s hard to adequately explain in a small section of one newsletter just how much OBBBA hurt working people, but we’ll try.
OBBBA slashed a record $1 trillion in Medicaid funding, and over the last year, no fewer than 3.8 million Americans have lost Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage. By 2034, experts estimate that number will spike to 15 million. OBBBA also slashed $300 billion in funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which has resulted in 4 million Americans—including 800,000 children—losing their benefits. People saw an average $300 boost in their tax refunds this year—a far cry from the $1,000 bump that Trump promised–but polling shows that they don’t think this boost makes up for these drastic cuts to essential services. And for what it’s worth, less than half of taxpayers who make less than $100,000 actually received an increased tax refund at all.
The “No Tax On…” provisions did help a few select workers, but not many, not by much, and not for long. For one thing, OBBBA’s tax breaks on tips, overtime, seniors, and auto loan interest comprised only a tenth of the bill’s net tax cuts. With regard to the deductions on tips and overtime, relatively few Americans actually benefit from them: roughly 3% of households benefit from the tips deduction while 9% benefit from the overtime deduction. And if that wasn’t enough, they help higher earners more than lower ones: compared to those earning less than $75,000, workers making over $200,000 receive an average benefit four times higher for the tips deduction and eight times higher for the overtime deduction. Meanwhile, all of these provisions are set to expire at the end of 2028 while the provisions boosting the fortunes of the already-rich were made permanent.
On the surface, these provisions from OBBBA seemed great, but in reality harmed working people while rewarding the wealthy and corporations.
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, this year, the top 20% of earners received 72% of the benefits from OBBBA, with the top 1% reaping 22% alone. Meanwhile, the bottom 20% of earners saw less than 1% of the benefits. But of course, it gets worse. If you factor in the effects of Trump’s tariffs and Republicans’ deliberate expiration of the Enhanced Premium Tax Credit, a tax credit that makes health insurance obtained through the Affordable Care Marketplace more affordable, everyone in America except the top 5% of taxpayers are paying higher taxes this year. The poorest 20% have it the worst: they are paying 3.1% more of their incomes in taxes this year.
Over the last year, we’ve heard people in our circles say that OBBBA is bad but that it mostly benefits the merely-rich, and not necessarily billionaires and the ultra-ultra-rich. We disagree. While OBBBA’s most well-known provisions might not do much for the billionaires who report very little ordinary income, some of the lesser-known provisions do quite a lot.
One of those provisions is OBBBA’s permanent extension of the 20% deduction for “pass-through” businesses, which politicians like to conflate with “small business,” as we alluded to above. We’ve spoken about these kinds of businesses in the past. Roughly 95% of all businesses in America are considered pass-through businesses, in which income “passes through” the business to their owners and is taxed under the regular, individual income tax system. The reality is that half of all pass-through income flows to the top 1% of income earners, which doesn’t exactly scream “Main Street” to us. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that over 60% of the benefits of the pass-through deduction flow to the top 1% of earners.
In 2021, ProPublica published a bombshell report that revealed the lengths that some billionaires went to lobby for the introduction of the 20% pass-through deduction in the 2017 TCJA, and also how much they went on to benefit from it. In 2018, the year after the bill passed, Michael Bloomberg saved nearly $68 million in taxes thanks to the deduction, while Dick and Liz Uihlein, the owners of packing company Uline, saved $43 million. All told, according to ProPublica, in 2018, 82 ultra-wealthy households saved $1 billion in taxes thanks to the pass-through deduction. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
At this writing, we don’t know how much billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and the Uihleins benefited from OBBBA’s extension of the pass-through deduction in the 2025 tax-filing season. But considering the fact that they are all wildly richer than they were seven years ago, we think it’s safe to assume they benefited a great deal.
Corporations and their billionaire executives and shareholders are also doing more than fine thanks to OBBBA’s business tax breaks, which were piled on top of the massive reduction in the corporate income tax rate enacted by the TCJA in 2017. No fewer than 88 corporations paid $0—that’s right, nothing—in federal corporate income taxes in 2025, including household names like Tesla, Southwest Airlines, Live Nation Entertainment, CVS, Paypal, and the Walt Disney Company. And remember when Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai stood behind the president during his inauguration in 2025? It looks like their face time with the president paid off big time, as their four companies—Tesla, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet—avoided $51 billion in taxes on over $315 billion in combined US income last year.
Conclusion
So there you have it. For the thousandth time, OBBBA was only “big” and “beautiful” for rich people like us and the companies we own.
Thankfully, we don’t have to work too hard to get this message out anymore. According to one recent poll, half of voters think that OBBBA helps the wealthy and corporations more than people like them, and only 16% think the opposite. That said, we still feel obligated to tell people the full extent to which OBBBA rigged the tax code to our benefit.
Last July, The Washington Post published a widely-read profile of our group which spotlighted three of our members—Kimberly Hoover, Drew Pomerance, and Morris Pearl—and their rejection of the tax breaks that OBBBA showered on them. We’ve also gotten creative on our social media channels in this regard. Our President, Erica Payne, filmed the below video shortly after OBBBA passed:
But we don’t just stop at words. Over the last year, we’ve put our money where our mouth is and actually worked to introduce two pieces of legislation in Congress from our legislative platform, The MONEY Agenda, that would work to counteract OBBBA. These are the Equal Tax Act and the Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act.
We don’t like that we have to mark this “maliversary” (our word for a bad anniversary) on America’s 250th birthday, and on every July 4th in the years to come. We’d prefer to focus on the hot dogs and parade floats. But maybe there’s a silver lining to it. The merging of these two days gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect on the state of our country and economy, and to recommit ourselves to the patriotic cause of creating a tax code that asks more of people like us. And if we do it right, we’re bound to put ourselves on a much more stable and equitable path for America’s next 250 years.